Massacres in Aleppo, Syria

August 4, 2012 - For the people of Aleppo, their only hope is Syria's security forces restoring order. In the pockets of Syria's largest city the so-called "Free Syrian Army" (FSA) has dug into, a campaign of systematic detention, torture, and mass murder has been carried out against "enemies of the revolution." Demonized as either "Shabiha" or "government supporters," men have been rounded up, lined up against walls, and gunned down en mass. Others await barbaric "drumhead trials" where FSA warlords deal out arbitrary justice under the guise of "Sharia law."

Image: The Western media is covering - or more accurately, "spinning" - an unfolding sectarian genocide in Syria's largest city Aleppo. In the alleys of seized streets, FSA terrorists are detaining, torturing, and killing anyone suspected of supporting the government. Such suspicions coincidentally run along sectarian divisions. By using the label "Shabiha" for all of FSA's victims, the Western press has given a carte blanche to genocidal sectarian extremists and by doing so, has become complicit in war crimes themselves.

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Worst of all, all of this is being reported by the Western media, but carefully downplayed, excused, spun, and otherwise sneaked through news cycles and headlines.

Reuters presented just such a report titled, "Rebels fill Aleppo power vacuum, some disapprove." Judging from the title, one might assume residents in the "liberated" alleys of select Aleppo neighborhoods are simply dissatisfied with late garbage collection and perhaps broken street lights. The title is far from the blood curdling hysteria accompanying Western accounts (and fabrications) of Syrian security operations over the last year and a half.

However, what Reuters actually reports is indeed growing basement-dungeons full of "suspected Shabiha," clear evidence of torture and abuse, as well as a growing number of summary executions and mass murder carried out before cameras and Western media in the streets.

The London Guardian likewise spins and downplays what are overt, ghoulish atrocities committed right on camera for the entire world to see. Russia Today covered one such massacre providing a graphic video depicting several bloodied men lined up against a wall and machine gunned to death, their bodies left in a tattered pile by FSA terrorists. RT leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that what they just witnessed was a war crime.

The Guardian however, begins downplaying the brutal massacre with the headline, "Syria crisis: rebels 'execute shabiha' in Aleppo." Already Guardian plays a role in shaping the potential reader's perception, convicting the massacred victims as "Shabiha." Scrolling down through a list of unverified accusations leveled against the Syrian government, one finds not an objective journalistic report of the massacre, but the justification provided by the FSA themselves, in a quote by Guardian's FSA "contact" that includes the somber warning:

"Regarding the video of the shabiha killed by the FSA, as far as I know
these shabiha are from the "Berri" clan in Aleppo. They have a long
history of being pro-regime shabiha and they have been involved in a lot
of killing in Aleppo.

The regime used to provide them with light
weapons and knives and gather them in schools to go and launch their
attacks against civilians. Just before they left one of the schools they
were caught by the FSA and killed.

In this war in which we left alone to fight such a vicious regime,
everything is possible and legitimate and as long as the international
community keeps looking at Syria in such carelessness, you will see more
of that and even worse."

The Guardian not only excuses what was a massacre of civilians, but sows the ground for excusing war crimes that eclipse even this episode of barbarism. Unfortunately, the Guardian is not alone - this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the Western media and signifies that as the military campaign winds down, the terror campaign is just beginning. US special interests' promise to "bleed" Syria is manifesting itself before our eyes.

The FSA's claims of everyone they round up, torture, and execute being "Shabiha" carry with them the familiar and horrifying ring of the term "African mercenaries" used to label black Libyans who were targeted by NATO-armed racist sectarian extremists also posing as "revolutionaries." In the end, entire cities were emptied out of blacks (and here) who had for generations called Libya home. Refugee camps were then systematically targeted until Libya's blacks were either dead, imprisoned or exiled beyond their homeland's borders as part of a brutal genocidal campaign covered up by the Western media and downplayed by the West's self-appointed global arbiters of human rights, namely Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

While the West still to this day claims Libya's blacks were "pro-Qaddafi," Libya's blacks had no choice but to fight NATO's terrorists of Benghazi, as their complexions and creeds, not political affiliations, had marked them as intolerable and undesirable by NATO's "liberators."

Likewise, a similar campaign of sectarian driven genocide, predicted for years should the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others unleash Al Qaeda aligned death squads across the Levant to destabilize their geopolitical enemies, is unfolding, due in part to the complicity of the Western media.

Image: Christians in Syria have been particularly hit hard by
what is being described as "ethnic cleansing," not by Syrian security
forces, but by NATO-backed death squads under the banner of the "Free
Syrian Army." The LA Times has been quietly reporting
on the tragedy of Syria's minorities at the hands of the Syrian rebels
for months - and indicates that wider genocide will take place, just as it is now in Libya, should Syria's government collapse under foreign pressure.

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In 2007, in Hersh's "The Redirection," the following foreshadowing to the NATO and FSA's unfolding genocidal rampage was given:

"Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a
severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to
Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, “we’ve got Sunni Arabs
preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to
protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the
United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and
the Shiites" -The Redirection, Seymour Hersh (2007)

With the Western press freely admitting that their "freedom fighting" FSA is lining up "suspected government supporters" and machine gunning them en mass, it seems the massacre the West feared would unfold in Aleppo has come to pass - only it wasn't perpetrated by the Syrian government or its security forces, but rather by NATO and the Gulf State's very own armed and coddled FSA terrorists.

As the West's machinations implode upon themselves and shareholders begin hedging their bets and distancing themselves from possible culpability for egregious crimes against humanity, we must hope that global opposition reaches a critical mass, forcing the West to stand down and allowing the Syrian government to restore order across their nation-state. Until then, we as individuals must identify, boycott, and replace the corporate-financier interests driving this insidious conspiracy against humanity. While swatting mosquitoes seems to be the most immediate remedy at hand, draining the swamp from within which they flourish is the only way to solve this problem permanently.